As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
A network interface controller (NIC) (also known as a network interface card, network adapter, local area network adapter, and other terms) is a physical hardware component that communicatively couples an information handling system to a network of one or more other information handling systems. In some cases, it is desirable or useful for a network administrator or other user to provision one or more virtual NICs for an information handling system. A virtual NIC is an abstract virtualized representation of an information handling system network interface that may or may not correspond directly to a physical network interface. The virtual NIC may appear to an operating system as a full-fledged NIC (e.g., an Ethernet NIC), complete with its own Media Access Control (MAC) address. The NIC emulation can be coupled to a host operating system in at least two ways. First, it may be bridged to the same physical network as a physical NIC. Second, it may be coupled to a virtual network created on the host operating system.
Traditionally, a virtual NIC is provisioned manually, wherein a user identifies the workload requirements (e.g., bandwidth, priority, redundancy, connectivity, etc.) for the virtual NIC and associates it with one or more partitions of a physical NIC in order to implement the virtual NIC. Such manual provisioning is cumbersome and can often lead to error.